Wednesday, 25 October 2017

The Staatsoperin
Hannover has, over the past few seasons, presented several of Hans Werner
Henze’s stage works. Last season it was Die
Englische Katze; this season it’s another opera with an English element, his
sharp comedy Der Junge Lord, premiered
up the road at Berlin’s Deutsche Oper in 1965 and set to a clear-sighted
and quick-witted libretto by Ingeborg Bachmann—based on a parable taken from an
1827 collection of stories by Wilhlem Hauff.

In brief: an English nobleman, Sir Edgar, wows then increasingly insults the inhabitants of the small German town of Hülsdorf-Gotha, before presenting them with
‘nephew’, Lord Barrat. This young lord impresses them with his refreshingly direct and unorthodox manners, even setting the local beauty’s heart a-flutter, before, as his behaviour gets increasingly wild, being exposed as an ape Sir Edgar has procured from a visiting circus. As a tale of hypocrisy, suggestibility and gullibility, it is surely as relevant as ever.

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Half a century on, Henze’s score retains remarkable sense of freshness, at
least as conducted here by Mark Rohde, whose incisive work was matched by
precision and virtuosity by the orchestra. Ostensibly inspired primarily by bel canto—and benefitting from that
genre’s clarity of texture as well as some relatively grateful vocal writing—it’s a work that throws in a variety of other
influences, too, all bound together expertly.

The director here, Bernd Mottl, offers up a staging that is every
bit as sharp. Hülsdorf-Gotha and its inhabitants are in stylised,
exaggerated black and white (costumes by Alfred Mayerhofer). In Friedrich
Eggert’s designs, the stage floor is chequered squares, the action contained
and variously focused within a series of black, frilly-edged panels.

Colour is
reserved for the English interlopers, led by the threateningly mute Sir Edgar,
here given real menace by Franz Mazura. The contrast is further underlined
through the uptight, preening manner of the Hülsdorf-Gotha residents and the
louche way of the visitors, epitomised of course by the young lord Barrat himself,
played here as rubber-limbed, gold lamé-suited Michael Jackson, c. 1985.

Hannover’s large ensemble cast was impressive, with
outstanding performances in particular from Stefan Adam, focused and
authoritative as Sir Edgar’s Secretary, and Sung-Keun Park, fearless both
physically and vocally as Lord Barrat. Rebecca Davis unveiled plenty of secure,
beautiful tone as Luise and Simon Bode sang mellifluously as her (moderately
interesting) initial love interest. Tichina Vaughn gave her all as the Jamaican cook Begonia—a broad caricature that perhaps dates the work more than any other
element.

The Romantic subplot arguably adds little to the drama, too, though it does offer Henze the opportunity for some seductive harp and celesta writing (a subconscious nod toDer Rosenkavalier?). But Luisa’s aria, the only freestanding number of the work, is less memorable than it should be—hovering uncertainly between sincerity and irony.

The piece’s undeniable freshness and wit also has to be
pitted against the sense one has that it’s just a little bit longer than it needs to be, the
premise that little bit too slight for its two hour-long acts. Nevertheless, given a staging as witty and sharp as this, one is in no doubt as
to Der junge Lord’s theatrical viability and, one hopes, continued longevity.

One would never have guessed that Hannover’s current
production of Der fliegende Holländer,
new last season, had come from the same director. A ruined
shopping mall is not a natural choice as setting for the work, to put it mildly, and Mottl’s
production never really managed to persuade me that it was a good choice, either—or
to offer any reason why the Dutchman should have ended up there.

The Spinning Chorus became a jolly
routine for a female chorus kitted out in fur coats, blond wigs and sunglasses,
with Senta, it seemed, a goth rebelling against commercialism and occasionally seeking solace in the piles of dirt
that surrounded the set.

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Mareike Moor’s Mary is kitted out in something like simple
19th-century garb; the Dutchman wears black leather; Erik, dressed in some sort
of camouflage with crop-sprayer’s backpack, seems to work in pest control. The
Steuermann (a clean-toned Edward Mout), sings his early song to a mannequin. Senta joins the object of her obsession at the close in a fire that gets
ignited during the big Act 3 party—turned into a big nautical-themed song-and-dance—in the shopping centre’s lower level.

Happily, at least the musical performance was on a very
high level. Ivan Repušić conducted an account of Wagner’s score that felt all
the more powerful for being a little reined-in and controlled. Gale force was unleashed only at key moments, and the work’s sheer musical craftsmanship was underlined throughout. The playing of the orchestra was very fine, too, mixing
impressive clarity with dramatic punch.

Krszysztof Szumanski stepped in as a late replacement as the
Dutchmann, singing with a pleasingly relaxed, expansive timbre, and with none of
the hectoring that one often hears in the role. Kelly God made a terrific
Senta, utterly secure and excitingly fearless, and Shavelg Armasi, though
vocally on the smaller end of the spectrum, brought plenty of character to her
father, who might or might not have been the owner of the mall itself. A special mention should be made, too, of Robert Künzli who, though
announced as indisposed, still sang Erik with a reliability that can’t always be taken for granted in this tricky role.

Friday, 20 October 2017

When asked what the essence of Wozzeck is in his booklet interview, Robert Carsen answers that ‘It presents a great hopelessness.’ His view of the work, as presented in his new
production for the Theater an der Wien, is unremittingly bleak then, made all the
more so for its military minimalist aesthetic.

Gideon Davey’s set consists of three camouflage walls
encompassing the stage, those on either side with multiple high openings. Wires
slung between them allow for sheets of material—also camouflage—to be
efficiently pulled across to delineate the space and cover up changes of the
largely minimal scenery.

Click to enlarge

When the space is opened up, we get the sense (amplified by
the characteristically atmospheric lighting by Carsen and Peter van Praet) of exaggerated perspective, especially
effective as we watch Wozzeck drown in the blue-green distance. As you’d expect
from Carsen, it’s a production that has a few moments of such poetry, of simple
means creating powerful effects.

But Berg’s opera and his version of Büchner’s brilliantly
drawn characters don’t always benefit, it seems to me, from the conceptual open
spaces of this particular aesthetic. The costumes see women and even children, as well
as the men, kitted out in military garb: here is a uniform world without
contrasts; we could be anywhere in time or place in the last half century.

There’s no flinching in the portrayal of this rogue’s gallery: the Captain (a sturdy, forthright John Daszak) is relentlessly
hectoring, the Doctor (an impressive Stefan Cerny) relentlessly cruel, the Tambourmajor (Aleš
Briscein, less heroic than many in the role) charmless and unremittingly sadistic.

The misery of Lise Lindstrom’s strongly and often beautifully sung Marie is
complete—and requires the occasional alleviation through drugs—and one gets
little sense of any joy whatsoever derived from her child, portrayed with a
heartbreaking sense of isolation at this performance by Samuel Wegleitner. The
only hint of respite in this world of misery comes in Benjamin Hulett’s
relatively breezy Andres.

At the heart of it all is an impressive Wozzeck from
Florian Boesch, who, as we know from his Lieder-singing, is never afraid to put expressionistic directness first; vocal beauty—and this is not a voice of
honeyed tones and rich colours in any case—is subordinated to dramatic truth.
Unlike with his Lieder-singing, though, here he seemed to have been encouraged to
draw from just one side of his broad expressive palette.

There were a handful of moments of hushed intimacy,
admittedly, but a predominance of raw, visceral roar. This was Wozzeck as beefy brute,
his animalistic qualities further emphasised at the start of his scene with the
Doctor: he sits downstage with his back to us blithely producing a stool
sample, wiping his bare backside before delivering his offering for inspection.

As a demonstration of the character’s humiliation and loss of dignity it was undeniably
effective. And I won’t forget in a hurry the moment, at the height of Wozzeck’s paranoia, that Boesch made his way to
the front of the stage to eyeball us and unleash the full power of his voice. But
reducing the character to an animal risked reducing us in the audience to viewers of some sort of nature documentary rather than spectators of a drama—and a deeply human one at that.

Wozzeck’s murder of Marie, conveyed with unblinking
directness, was shocking; but neither that nor his final stumble through a
field of bodies (dead, one presumed, but it wasn’t entirely clear) moved me on
an emotional level. The child’s forlorn ‘Hopp, hopp’ at the close, a rifle repurposed
as hobbyhorse, was also less touching than it can be in stagings that cover more of the spectrum between the human and the animal. In focusing powerfully on
the dehumanising effects of military life, Carsen was making an important point; but he also, it seemed to me, lost some of the work’s richness, blunting its tragedy.

Arguably the work’s richness was also what was primarily
lost in the orchestral performance, with Leo Hussain conducting a new version of
the score by Eberhard Kloke—largely a matter of compression of the instrumentation
so that the Wiener Symphoniker could be squeezed into the Theater an der Wien’s
modest pit.

Sinewy and raw, conducted with a powerful sense of focus, it nevertheless complemented Carsen’s forceful vision well—a vision given yet greater force by fearlessly committed performances from the Arnold Schoenberg Choir and the well-drilled cast.

Friday, 13 October 2017

Simon Rattle has over recent years established himself as something like the Staatsoper’s resident Janáček conductor here in Berlin, having been at the helm of performances of both From the House of the Dead and Kátya Kabanová during that company’s stint at the Schillertheater. Here, though, was a chance to hear him put his own orchestra – or one of them, at least – through its paces with the work that is generally agreed to have put the Czech composer on the map in Germany.

Friday, 6 October 2017

So, finally... seven years and over €400m later, the Staatsoper unter den Linden has reopened. At least temporarily – it closes again for a couple of months after this week’s celebrations before the season kicks off again for good in December.

These reopening celebrations were supposed to have centred around a new Saul by Wolfgang Rihm, cancelled when the composer fell seriously ill. After scouting around for an alternative Intendant Jürgen Flimm plumped for Schumann’s Faust-Szenen, bolstered by segments of Goethe’s play...

There has been something of a flurry of new Freischütz stagings in my adopted corner
of Germany over the last few years, with recent new productions in Berlin,
Dresden and Leipzig. Of these I only saw the latter, earlier this year, but I can
now add the 1999 Hamburg staging by Leipzig’s former Intendant, Peter
Konwitschny, to the list—a list whose UK section includes only concert performances.

Now something of a classic (the next performance after the
matinée I attended was the 50th in the house), Konwitschny’s staging is getting now getting its final run at this address. I’m very glad to have seen it, for it’s a
characteristically intelligent, questing and mischievous, iconoclastic affair.

Max’s insecurities are the basis of the whole plot, but are
too easily explained away as acceptable in traditional world of
thrusting horn-calls and the casual killing of innocent beasts. Not here,
though, where the production, at least as seen on this revival, exposes and
almost mocks his weakness. He is unsure and jittery throughout, memorably harangued
by a confrontational group of motley stage musicians in the opening scene; too easily
led astray; more than ever, one feels, undeserving of his last-minute reprieve.

(click to enlarge)

The focus, emotional and dramatic, is put squarely onto
Agathe, played serenely here by the terrific Iulia Maria Dan, and sung in a
voice that offers exciting hints of the dramatic through its velvety lyric surface—this
member of the Hamburg ensemble is definitely a name to watch.

The character seems better than the situation she finds
herself in, not least because Konwitschny, in a characteristic fourth
wall-breaking touch, reveals the Hermit (a resonant Tigran Martirossian) as a
suave audience member watching her, with a mixture of paternal concern and
infatuation, from the front row of the stalls.

The opera itself, in as much as
it exists here as a self-contained work, is shown as coming to a close before
the Hermit’s final intervention, at which point a puzzled stage manager tries to work
out what’s going on before all the cast and chorus come back onto the stage for
a celebratory glass of bubbly.

The primary feature of Gabriele Koerbl’s set is a elevator door,
stage right, the indicator lights above which hint at mysterious ascents and
descents, including, for the Wolf’s Glen, to the realm of Samiel. (S)he is represented
in that scene by a suave Otto Katzameier, but turns up as a slinky viola-playing
she-devil (Naomi Seiler) in Ännchen’s ‘Einst träumte meine sel’gen Base’—a
touch that was strangely reminiscent of the violin-playing ‘angel’ at the close
of Christoph Marthaler’s Luluhere
earlier in the year.

Katharina Konradi’s sparky, mischievous Ännchen was
excellent here as throughout, and the four Bridesmaid’s deserve a special
mention, too, each minutely characterised as they presented their song as a
nervous series of individual performances.

The Wolf's Glen scene is itself brilliantly realised, too, Samiel’s
voice resonating through speakers as Caspar manufactures the magic bullets above a television, with moral support from malfunctioning mechanical owl. Whether deliberately or not, the scene
also became reminiscent of Mime cooking up his broth for Siegfried, as
seen at least in many recent stagings, meaning that I heard forest murmurings in Weber’s
score that I’d not really noticed before. Malfunctioning, sinister technology is
present throughout, even in the interval, where the theatre's foyers
are filled with the continued eerie tick tock that brings the second act to a disquieting conclusion.
As a repertoire revival there were some rough edges musically here and there, but conductor Christof Prick paced the performance well. Burkhard Fritz seemed to be having a bit of an off day as Max, too, but his underpowered vocal performance was arguably of a piece with Konwitschny’s characterisation of the role—a characterisation that, along with its corollary in the elevation of Agathe, was central to the director’s compelling rethinking of the whole piece.

Tuesday, 3 October 2017

Before being persuaded to direct the Ring for LA Opera at the beginning of the decade, Achim Freyer had
apparently decided to abandon directing opera to concentrate on painting. Now, however, he also gives a new Parsifal. And he’s staging Hänsel
und Gretel at the newly refurbished Staatsoper unter den Linden in Berlin
in December as well—that glorious work by a composer, Humperdinck, who was of
course intimately bound up with Parsifal’searly
history in Bayreuth.

In Hamburg his take on the Master’s great Bühnenweihfestspiel is a serious, often
enchanting piece of work, and a staging that is refreshing for
its patience, its willingness to take its time and its singlemindedness. His set, a dark semi-circle with multiple walkways set behind a
gauze stretched right over the orchestra pit, feels like its own self-contained
galaxy.

Numbers and hieroglyph-like objects are dotted about it as
if set free from both weight and significance; an adjustable mirrored
semi-circle hovers above, as does a big metal structure resembling the
mixing attachment of a food processor.

Swirls and various Parsifalian keywords are projected (video
by Jakob Klaffs and Hugo Reiss) at various moments onto the gauze, though were difficult to take in
from my seat in row 4 of the stalls. The players, their expressions frozen in
semi-grotesque face paint, drift in and out during the Prelude and seem barely to be
in command of their own destinies thereafter.

Kundry flies in, with the help of naïve stage effects (not always fully realised), at
her various entries; Parsifal bounces in and out and rolls about like some
malfunctioning children’s entertainer; Amfortas, stretched across some sort of
yoke, his body represented by a painted cloth, is manhandled from side to side by a couple of hooded retainers hovering
in a state of semi-invisibility. Titurel consists, in two dimensions, of little more than two arms, a wheelchair and what, to me at least, looked like stubby telescope.

Gurnemanz, a crude papier-mâché face suspended in a haphazardly spiralling frame above his head, glides around with little sense of purpose. Squires and
grail knights arm themselves in moments of threat with arbitrary objects: an
oversize spanner, a stuffed rabbit, a dismembered arm. At the climax of the
grail ceremony a small white figure with oversized head and an underlit
lampshade for a skirt makes its way slowly across the stage.

On one level it’s a magical mystery tour de force from
Freyer, who works with the music, surfing its slow-moving waves to sometimes
hypnotic effect. There are plenty of telling little details, too, not least in
the grotesque costume for Vladimir Baykov’s powerfully-sung, leering Klingsor:
an enormous tie covers a bright red patch in his groin, the site of the self-mutilation we see acted out wittily—if that’s the word—at the appropriate point Gurnemanz’s Act 1
narration. I liked the bulbous, punky voluptuousness of his Flower
Maidens, too, who manage to combine, like so much of the production, playful irreverence
with an underlying seriousness.

As the show progresses, though, it becomes a case of diminishing returns.Having cast
everything into a state weightlessness, Freyer has no interest, it seems, in tethering it back onto anything as the gravity of the final act’s drama
kicks in. The first half of that act, with only the merest hint, through
Sebastian Alphons’s lighting, of Easter greenery, resorts to a somewhat
conventional rehearsal of Wagner’s stage directions. And Wolfgang Koch, sounding slightly under par, was unable
to give specific meaning to his suffering as a bedraggled, lank-hared Amfortas.
With the action never having been allowed too fully take root, the final
redemption amounted simply to a further clearing of the decks, with the set
pulled down and whisked away. We are left with an emptiness both spatial and
conceptual.

Part of the sense of dissatisfaction here might also have
been down to Kent Nagano’s conducting. The orchestral playing
had some wobbles, but I enjoyed his streamlined but largely persuasive account of the
first two acts—are the conductor’s plans for a period-instrument Ring with Concerto Köln already
affecting his approach? The third act, however, felt almost evasive in its swiftness. The winding lines of the Prelude came across as dogged,
while elsewhere things remained somewhat earthbound, without conjuring up
enough of sense of anything, however difficult to define, being at stake.

None of this helped the cast, either. Kwangchul Youn’s Gurnemanz
provided superbly resonant and authoritative foundation for the drama, but was left unable, in the circumstances, to plumb the depths in Act 3, or really to make much of the text.

Andreas Schager’s Parsifal, dressed in asymmetric
black-and-white, sang powerfully and acted, as usual, with total commitment, but both he
and Claudia Mahnke’s impressive Kundry (rich in the lower register, seductive in the middle if stretched
at the top) struggled to convey their passions and sufferings through the
make-up and, in Mahnke’s case, industrial dreadlocks.

In a statement in the programme, Freyer talks, apparently
unironically, of being obliged to save the essential works of our time from the
mistakes of interpretation. That represents quite a lofty stance, and what he’s offered has its own special beauty and conviction. It doesn’t, however, really offer the compelling alternative he seems to be after.

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About Me

I am freelance critic, writer and musicologist based in Berlin. I have held editorial posts at Gramophone and Opera, was opera critic of the Spectator and have worked as a critic for the Daily Telegraph and Financial Times. I was editor of 30-Second Opera (Ivy Press, 2015), now also available – when I checked last – in French, German and Spanish. My PhD (awarded from King's College London in early 2011) was a critical reassessment of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's 'Die Frau ohne Schatten'; further details of my academic work can be found under 'Publications and Papers'.
If you'd like to email me, I can be reached on hugojeshirley[at]gmail.com.

About this Blog

Fatal Conclusions is designed to serve as a modest outlet for various reviews (of varying levels of formality and punctuality) and ideas regarding what's going on in the Opera and Classical Music worlds--and, if I'm feeling adventurous, beyond. Thanks for popping by. I hope you enjoy reading and please feel free to leave comments.